Donald Trump on New Year’s Eve told reporters that he was privy to new information others weren’t in regards to Russia and hacking claims, but one of his advisers said Trump may be "playing with" the American public and that the President-elect was an "expert at this kind of weaving around and attracting everybody’s attention."

"Seems to me this is a behavioral mode that he has perfected," James Woolsey, one of Trump’s national security advisers, told Jim Sciutto on CNN’s "The Lead with Jake Tapper" on Monday according to Mediaite.

"And he — he has a point. Which is that it is entirely possible to have various definitions of hacking, and there's hacking and then there's hacking. There is hacking in which you actually destroy something or put in malware that leads to destruction later. That's terrible. There is hacking in which you steal stuff, which is really bad. There is hacking in which you just look and try to figure out what's going on. And I think that this misunderstanding or back and forth between him and others is partly about his talking about one kind of hacking and their maybe talking about another."

Woolsey served as the CIA director during the Clinton administration. He joined Trump’s team in September.

Donald Trump on New Year's Eve told reporters that he was privy to new information others weren't in regards to Russia and hacking claims, but one of his advisers said Trump may be playing with the American public and that the President-elect was an expert at this kind...